Sharon Olds Essay - Olds, Sharon (Vol. 32)

Olds is regarded as a promising poet on the basis of her first two volumes, Satan Says (1980) and The Dead and the Living (1984). She often writes about pain, anger, and violence with extreme emotional involvement, but she also depicts with gentle humor her experiences as a girl, a woman, and a mother. Despite the intensely personal nature of Olds's poetry, critics note her ability to evoke the universal. They also praise her handling of such contrasting topics as violence and love, death and life, and terror and humor.

[Satan Says is] an emotionally young book; hate and love of parents, woman suddenly out on her own, the frightened wife and mother. Olds's experience can easily be shared: she focuses on simple, everyday occurrences and uses the poem to give them deeper meaning. There are a few first-book problems, such as an overuse of tough sexual words (which after a while seem thrown in for shock value), a self-consciousness about being a writer, too many similes, and a few images which verge on the superficial, but these are all things which can be outgrown easily.

Sharon Olds' poems [in Satan Says] are perpetually balanced at the edge of hyperbolic violence—a balance maintained between the deep psychological sources of her poems and the vivid, many-layered imagery in which they are expressed…. There are poems of extreme emotions, and though Olds occasionally becomes mired in her own tendency toward bombast, the many poems that achieve their proper mixture of reality and nightmare are simply stunning.

Sharon Olds's first book [Satan Says], which is uncompromisingly autobiographical, is divided into sections titled for the roles in which she experiences herself, "Daughter," "Woman," and "Mother." There is also a fourth section, called "Journeys," which implicitly connects the three roles. The poems are passionate and, especially in the "Daughter" group, explosive with pain and anger. She moves (and usually persuades) us by the very passion, even need, of her utterance. By the same token, she sometimes allows her rage to go out of control, using a voice so vehement, a language so hyperbolic, as to incur disbelief, at least in this reader. The line between a language that can accommodate extremes of hurt and outrage, and a language that either distorts or fails to sustain its momentum, is especially thin in the first half of the book, which also contains some instances of uneasy metaphor. In "Love Fossil," for example, the poet's father is compared with a "vegetarian" dinosaur: "massive, meaty, made of raw steak, / he nibbled and guzzled, his jaw dripping weeds and bourbon …" And in "Monarchs" she compares a lover's touch to that of the butterfly: "their wings the dark red of / your hands like butchers' hands …" Even if one accepts the comparison between the orange wings of a monarch butterfly and a man's hands, the match is annulled by the added simile. Monarch wings can't be like butchers' hands, by any stretch of the imagination.

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Sharon Olds survives the battling of an alcoholic father and a mother who "… took us and / hid us so he could not get at us / … so there were no more / tyings by the wrist to the chair, / no more denial of food" ("That Year"). Olds consistently sees her personal survival in terms of the primal, female relationships of Daughter, Mother and Lover. These are, in fact, three of the [four divisions of Satan Says], and the relationships quiver to life in poems bristling with comparison, metaphor and simile—mighty attempts by one woman to connect a disconnected world.

For instance, in ["Love Fossil"] from the section "Daughter" what is most striking is Olds' vigorous and fecund metaphorical imagination…. Father as dinosaur is a fit beginning for Olds' habit of describing the body as spirited, inhabited, and wild…. And in "First Night" (first poem in the section "Woman"): "The inhabitants of my body began to / get up …" as "Rivers changed course, / the language turned neatly about / and started to go the other way."

Throughout Satan Says the language often does "turn neatly about." In Olds' vocabulary ordinary objects, landscapes—even whole planets—are in constant motion. Using verbs which might seem, at first, almost grotesque, she manages to describe a violent, changing universe where "the sky rubs against itself / as if about to create a planet" ("Geography") and trees "looked as if they could...

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The deeply felt cycle of poems [in The Dead and the Living] concerns the universal experiences of death, both public and private, and life…. From executions in Iran to her own miscarriage, Olds writes about the loss of life with passion, yet control. Her language is direct, her imagery vivid, her subjects credible. There is a poem about her aging grandmother, still witty and full of life, another about her mean grandfather who drank, and her father who resembled him. In "Poems for the Living," Olds confesses her mother's fierce hatred of her husband and the influence of this on the children. In a gentler vein, she tells of her own children growing up, and the depth of a mother's love. This admirable volume is the poet's second collection of verse.

A review of "The Dead and the Living," in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 224, No. 20, November 11, 1983, p. 40.

"The Dead and the Living" is a family album prefaced by snapshots of the century's agonies—images of executions, race riots and gory death from Tulsa, Okla., to Chile and from Rhodesia to Iran. O.K., we can take it. At this theatrical distance we are not touched to the core….

Such horrors are thawed by the rhythm of words: They remain static conundrums to be puzzled out with a meditative gaze. Only when this photographic technique of intimate exposure is transferred to her family does Sharon Olds come into her own. It is the private scrutiny that shocks—the day of her mother's divorce, her first period, sex after childbirth, a 6-year-old boy's erection on the back seat of a car. Nothing is too...

[The Dead and the Living] explores the bonds of love and terror that hold a family together. This beautifully structured collection, the Lamont poetry selection for 1983, moves from public to private, from poems for the dead to poems for the living. Always, Sharon Olds's voice is a private one, even in the "public" poems. She insists on making us see the intimate details of public atrocities: the "pale spider-belly head" of a newborn dead in Rhodesia, the face of a starving girl in Russia, the "blazing white shirts" of white men in Tulsa race riots. Her images in this first section of poems are as unflinching and immediate as news photographs.